


Saltwater Ballad

by jouissant



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Cruise Ship, Historical, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-12
Updated: 2017-08-12
Packaged: 2018-12-14 07:58:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11778780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: After the war, Dick sets sail.(Or, the postwar ocean liner AU you never knew you wanted.)





	Saltwater Ballad

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dancinguniverse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinguniverse/gifts).



> The seed of this idea came from _Beyond Band of Brothers:_
> 
> "I no longer thought I wanted to stay around home while I adjusted to civilian life after this cruel war ended. I joked that I might get a job on a tramp steamer as a deckhand or on a liner in some capacity and just sail around until I had seen the world or until I was tired of traveling."
> 
> ...and was watered by dancinguniverse, who suggested exploring it when I asked for prompts for her FTH auction fic. The ship itself is loosely based on the RMS _Caronia_ , and most of the research into gay culture at sea at midcentury (and before and after) comes courtesy of _Hello, Sailor: The Hidden History of Gay Life At Sea_ by Paul Baker and Jo Stanley. See, I read a book, that's why this took 8 months to finish. :| 
> 
> Anyway, @dancinguniverse I had a blast writing this for you, and I hope you enjoy!!

"The guy in the honeymoon suite's all alone," Jim said. 

Dick was looking over his cabin assignments and wasn't paying attention. 

"Hey," Jim said, fetching Dick a fierce elbow to the ribs. "Winters." 

"Huh," Dick said. 

"I said, this Nixon guy booked out a king suite and now he's flying solo." 

"Hmm," Dick said. "That'll be roomy." 

"Roomy? Poor sap got jilted, the last thing he wants is roomy. Nixon. You recognize that name? I swear I recognize that name." 

Jim leaned back against the railing on the shade deck, New York Harbor looming up behind him. He narrowed his eyes at Dick. "Shit, for a shade deck it sure is bright. Think I can coax Phil up there starkers sometime?" 

"I think you can be persuasive when you want to be," said Dick equivocally. "And how do you figure he got jilted? Maybe he just likes his space." 

Jim fished out his own assignment, typed up and doled out by the chief steward just this morning. They were waiting on the laundry and then they'd be set loose to make the rooms up ahead of departure. Dick was timing the dryers and tapping his foot on the deck. He disliked being idle. Jim, on the other hand, had it down to an art form. 

"Here," he said, thrusting the paper at Dick. "Check it out. Hmm, why d'you think they bothered crossing Katherine Nixon's name off the manifest?" 

"Probably because Larsen's a stickler and wants an accurate headcount." 

Jim lit a cigarette. "Probably. And probably 'Nixon, Lewis' is still on it because he's crossing the Atlantic all by his lonesome." 

"For whatever reason," Dick said. 

"Because he got jilted." 

"He might've done the jilting," Dick said. "Ever think of that?" He folded his cabin assignment into a square and slipped it into his pocket. His uniform set on him heavy as dress greens as he leaned against the railing beside Jim. 

"No way," Jim said. "They booked this ticket out of New York together and now he's the only one taking it. That's a broken heart move any way you figure it." He elbowed Dick again. "Haven't you ever had your heart broken, Winters?"

Dick chewed on his bottom lip. "No," he said. 

Jim snorted. "Well, then you've never been in love." He took a long drag of his cigarette and tilted his head back, twisting around to exhale against the jagged horizon. 

Dick shrugged. He couldn't argue with that. He turned around and leaned out, the railing pressing against his ribcage. Below them the harbor water was brownish and placid. He'd come to dislike the harbor as much as he did idleness—it was its own variety, after all. He felt the ship hated it as much as he did, the way she pitched in her moorings beneath them when the tugboats came past. 

"You seeing anyone tonight?" Jim said. "Speaking of love. Last night on dry land before the bloods get their claws in us." 

Jim tried hard to talk like a seaman. Bloods meant the passengers. Dick rolled his eyes. "No. I might go for a walk along the river, though, if I'm quick making those cabins up." 

"You will be. You always are." Jim squinted at him. "You sure you've never been in love?" 

Dick felt his face get hot. He peered out over at the skyscrapers, the diamond gleam of the Empire State. After the war he meant to stay here awhile, to take the elevator all the way up to the observation deck, to pick his way along the city streets and figure things out. He never had. He'd set foot back on all this hallowed American ground and wanted nothing more than to leave again, and the sooner the better. 

"Why does it matter?" he asked Jim now. 

"It doesn't," Jim sniffed. "Anyway, maybe you're just not the loving kind. There's nothing wrong with it. Just ask Lewis Nixon." 

"Yeah," said a third voice. "As a matter of fact, it's true. Lewis Nixon doesn't know from love. I also hear he's a bit of a lush, so. Lock up your whiskey and your daughters." 

Dick and Jim looked up. There was a man standing there at the top of the stairs that led out onto the shade deck. He was wearing civvies—a sharply cut suit and hat—and looking midway between put out and amused. He had thick dark hair and furrowed brows drawn close together courtesy of the bright April sun. As they watched he unhooked a pair of aviator sunglasses from the placket of his shirt and put them on. They looked funny with the suit. 

Beside him, Jim had paled. Dick had half a mind to turn tail and leave him, but if he had shipboard friends Jim was the best of them, and he wouldn't bag that just to prove a point. 

"I suppose you're Lewis Nixon," Jim said, with only a hint of quaver. "You're not supposed to be up here. Boarding's not until tomorrow morning." 

He nodded at the red-and-white painted tin sign that hung over the deck. STAFF ONLY, it read. Nixon barely gave it a glance. He had the air of someone who'd never let a sign tell him where he could and couldn't be. 

"Well, would you look at that," he said, without looking at the sign. "Sorry, gentlemen. The captain's a family friend, see, and when he heard I was sailing tomorrow he said I ought to come aboard early and have a look around." 

"It's dangerous up here," Jim said, sticking his chin out. "You shouldn't go poking about where you don't belong." 

Jim was a slip of a guy on his best day, and in his uniform in front of Nixon he looked like a schoolboy. Oh, God, Dick thought. Quit while you're ahead.

"Hmm, you're right about that," Nixon said. "I certainly don't belong here." 

And he did turn and look at the sign then, and then from Jim to Dick and back. This parting shot irritated Dick, the snobbishness of it, though Dick got the sudden impression the man was embarrassed and thus determined to make the two of them feel the same way. At any rate, there was something behind the words Dick couldn't help but notice, wouldn't have been able to place without knowing what he knew about Nixon's cabin assignment. 

"Look," Dick said, clearing his throat. "You're welcome to take a look around up here. But if I were you I'd go and check in with the harbormaster and have him track down the captain for you. You might save yourself some trouble." 

Nixon looked at him evenly. Maybe let his eyes linger a little too long, though Dick thought that was probably beside the point just now. If they were lucky Nixon would politely request some other steward, maybe ask to be placed in the capable hands of an old Cunard pro. If they weren't the pair of them would be watching the ship steam off from the pier and be out their pay and fines for board and uniforms besides. 

"Trouble," Nixon said. He grinned. Then he broke into a laugh and clapped Dick on the shoulder. "Trouble, he says. Well, thanks for the heads up, Red." 

He was drunk, Dick decided. He tried to shoot Jim a look, but the man was preoccupied looking green, probably calculating just how well screwed over he was. 

"Don't suppose you could walk me back down," Nixon said. He was still looking at Dick. 

Dick swallowed. "I'm afraid not," he said. "I'm right in the middle of something. But it's just down those stairs there, back the way you came." 

Nixon cocked his head to one side acquiescently, then turned and leaned heavily on the railing, staring out over the harbor. He was certainly drunk. He was weaving from side to side, more than the pitch of the ship could account for, and Dick thought he could make out the shape of a flask in his pocket. 

"Dick, I'll take him," Jim muttered. 

"He'll find his way," Dick said, a little surprised at the hardness in his own voice. 

He'd known men like Nixon all his life, but especially at war, and he found he didn't like them any better now. Officers who talked a big game in the CP only to end up furtive drunks in the field, promotions that had more to do with a man's alma mater than his objective qualities or achievements, that belligerent and glad-handing sort of stupidity he associated with Harry pitched over in the middle of a road in Normandy, Dick hissing at him from the hedgerow scared half out of his mind. 

"What if he falls in or something?" Jim asked fretfully.

"He won't," Dick said.

But he sighed, and knew abruptly he would give in. "Go and check on the laundry. I'll take care of it," he said to Jim, who nodded gratefully and double-timed down the stairs to clatter belowdecks to the machines. When he'd gone Dick went up to Nixon and tapped the railing next to him to get his attention. 

"C'mon," he said. "I'll walk you down." 

Nixon was reticent on the way, trailing after Dick, and it wasn't until he'd been safely deposited onshore and Dick had turned away and had a foot on the gangplank that he spoke again. "Hey, Red," he said, and Dick sighed again and turned back around. 

"It's Winters," he said. 

"Winters," said Nixon, looking abashed. "Listen, I was out of line up there." 

"It's all right, sir," said Dick. 

"God, don't—don't sir me, I don't deserve it." Nixon ducked his head, which made Dick look at his own shoes sympathetically. "Anyway," Nixon went on, "you figured out my change in travel plans. Doesn't excuse the poor attitude, but I guess it's got me at sixes and sevens." 

"Well, sure," Dick said, as easily as if he actually knew what he was talking about. He could hear Jim nattering on in his head. You ever been in love? he'd asked. "It's—it's understandable." 

"Is it?" 

"I guess," Dick said. 

Nixon gave him an odd look. "Just—tell your buddy I'm sorry." 

"Do you really know the captain?" Dick asked.

Nixon nodded. "My grandfather was a shipbuilder. Larsen knew my father when he was a boy. Grandpa would have loved this. He'd have gotten a kick out of the green paint." 

The ship's hull was painted a pale pistachio that striped the harbor water with warping swathes of milky jade. 

"I sent my mother a picture postcard and she wrote to say it made her look like a luna moth. The ship, I mean," Dick said.

Nixon grinned. "Luna moth," he said. "I like that." He kicked at a coil of rope. "So, you along for the ride?" 

"To Southampton? Yes." 

"And what do you do onboard?" 

"I'm a steward. Manage the cabins. Fetch people what they need. Make the beds up. Mix drinks, although I can't say I'm any great shakes when it comes to bartending." 

It was the truth, though why he was telling it to Nixon he didn't know. And anyway, he'd probably sailed before and knew full well what a steward did. Dick felt like Jim all of a sudden, foot in his mouth, but Nixon only laughed. 

"Hope you're not my steward, then," he said. He slid his sunglasses down his nose, the better to fix his large, dark eyes on Dick's face. 

"I doubt it," Dick said. 

He let the words fall into the space between them. They'd been batting back and forth but now Nixon seemed content to let things lie. Which was fine, Dick thought. No reason it shouldn't be. Only for a moment he'd felt a twinge of camaraderie, or maybe something more. However misplaced, he'd found himself enjoying it.

***

The following morning saw them standing on deck in full uniform, waiting to receive the passengers. Jim was beside him, drowsy and swaying with a hangover. He'd spent all night in the nightclubs around Times Square, he said, and dragged his good friend Phil back to his cabin in the wee hours of the morning for a last hurrah. He'd looked rather pleased with himself when he recounted all this to Dick, despite the fact he was as green as the hull of the ship. Jim was always pleased with himself about something or other, and Dick had found it tedious at first before realizing it was simply the end result of long years with little to be pleased about one way or another. Jim left home at thirteen and had been getting by however he could ever since. He'd joined the Navy in the war and caught word you could live a life like his more than passably well at sea, and so when the war was over that was what he'd set out to do. Dick had long since decided he deserved to crow about it. Phillip was on the deck crew and looked as though he could break Jim over his knee, and that seemed to make Jim very pleased indeed. 

Sometimes Dick caught Jim looking at him, seeming thoughtful, and he knew Jim was wondering about him, if they had more in common than just their line of work. He'd never asked outright. Dick didn't imagine he'd lie if Jim did ask, but when Jim hinted he pretended not to catch on, and then Jim hinted less often, and eventually he mostly stopped. 

Now he elbowed Dick, who was standing at an easy parade rest. He felt about fifty percent less stiff than he ever had in the Army, even with the sun beating down on his cap and Jim's elbow in his side. 

"Hey," Jim hissed. 

"What?" 

"Do me a favor." 

"What's that?" 

"Swap a cabin with me."

Dick rolled his eyes. "Which cabin, I wonder." 

"C'mon, Winters. I can't look him in the eye after yesterday." 

"He's not a bad guy," Dick said. "He apologized. Said he was put out over his circumstances." 

Jim chewed on the inside of his cheek. "Can't blame him, I guess." 

"No." Dick sighed. "But look, if you really want me to—" 

"Would you?" 

"Sure. But you've got that family in twelve with the two little kids." 

Jim glared. "Goddammit, Dick." 

"Beggars can't be choosers," Dick said. 

When the passengers streamed on board the stewards found themselves busy with this and that, and it wasn't until later that Dick had a moment to knock on the door of Lewis Nixon's cabin. It was the finest on the deck, to be sure, and honestly a little out of Dick's way; Jim had a couple years on him in terms of experience, and his seniority meant he was entrusted with the higher-priced cabins and their ostensibly more cultured denizens. Most of Dick's cabins were the next deck down. They had windows but not balconies, and their rooms tended to pitch more dramatically when the wind was up. 

Dick had just come from a cabin containing a pallid woman and her worried husband, who confided in Dick that his wife was pregnant and ill from the ship's rocking, and could Dick possibly find a doctor and get them some sort of tablet. Dick didn't know from babies, and he didn't know how to get past seasickness other than to muscle through it, which was what he had done when he first started, leaning over the railing to vomit when nobody was looking. But he'd promised to see about it, and his route up to the infirmary had taken him past this last cabin, the one he'd found himself avoiding for some reason. 

Nixon opened on the third knock, looking scruffy and not a little green himself. 

"Oh," he said to Dick. "It's you." 

"Unfortunately," Dick said. 

Nixon was quiet for a moment, mouth hanging open, and then he burst into laughter, which went past jocular into uncomfortable, particularly when he leaned and against the door jamb and groaned. 

"I feel like shit," he said. "You'd better come inside."

Dick followed him back into the cabin and stood at attention as Nixon flopped backwards onto the bed. His traveling case had expelled its contents all over half the room, a flotsam of rich fabrics, unmated shoes. Dick's fingers itched to pick them up and fold them, set the shoes in the wardrobe two by two. Nixon looked as though the prospect couldn't be further from his mind. 

"Settling in all right?" Dick asked, with only one eye on the clothes. 

"Peachy," said Nixon. "We in international waters yet?" 

"I'd have to check our bearings," Dick said. "I can make a note of it and let you know." 

Nixon shut his eyes and crossed his arms behind his head. "No need. I was just wondering. Did you mean what you said about mixing a lousy drink?" 

Dick shrugged. "What did you have in mind?" 

"I'll make it easy for you, how's that," said Nixon. "Neat whiskey. I even brought my own. Stashed it over in the bar there." 

Dick raised an eyebrow. Sure enough, atop the wet bar was a troop of curvaceous bottles. "Weren't taking any chances, were you," he said. "Ice?" 

"Please. Look, I know what I like. No sense in denying yourself what you like, is there?" 

Dick didn't answer, only turned to the bar with the uncomfortable feeling of having been seen. He opened a bottle, leaned down and filled a tumbler with cubes from the tray in the little ice box. He poured the whiskey over it, held the bottle to his nose a moment, experimentally. 

"Have one," Nixon said. 

Dick started and put the bottle down. "I'm working," he said. "Here." He handed the glass to Nixon, who took it, sat up and drank gratefully. 

"Come back when you're finished," Nixon said.

"I don't drink," said Dick. 

"Come back anyway." 

Dick sighed. He somehow felt awfully like sighing in Nixon's presence. There was a weight about the man that a part of Dick seemed to believe he could shift by breath alone. Futile, surely. Pointless to even think of trying, and that was before Dick had even begun to unpack the question of why on earth he'd want to. Nixon was probably a drunk, and probably dissolute. And he'd been rude to Dick, and to Jim. 

"Why are you looking at me like I kicked your dog?" 

"Are you sure I can't hang up your clothes?" Dick asked, prodding at a mound of what looked like cashmere. 

"If I say yes, will you come back after your shift?" 

"Why?" 

"To keep me company. To tell me why a guy like you started waiting on guys like me hand and foot when I can tell you hate it." 

"I don't hate it," Dick said.

"Okay," said Nixon. 

Dick felt suddenly, fiercely defensive of the ship and all her denizens, all the men and women who had become his friends. He couldn't pretend the men didn't remind him of the war, though there were no easy analogues, no collection of fellows he could point to and say there's Harry, and there's Lip, and there's Speirs. It was more the collective amity of them, the way they set themselves to hard work and sometimes took the passengers for a common enemy. The women he admired bemusedly, maids and a couple of the cooks who gave as good as they got and worked twice as hard as the men in the kitchen and came and outdrank half the stewards and waiters in the crew bar belowdecks. 

Dick sighed again. "Can I get you anything else, Mr. Nixon?" 

Nixon lay back down again, cradling his drink. "No, thank you," he said. "When's dinner, again?" 

"You've got a standing reservation for the eight-thirty seating," said Dick. 

Nixon rolled his eyes. "Figures. Kathy always did like eating late. Said it was more Continental." 

"Should I see about changing it?" 

"Don't worry. I guess I can use a little sophistication, huh, Winters." 

Nixon stretched like a cat, palms splayed toward the opposite wall. He was in his shirtsleeves, and the hem of his shirt had wrinkled and rucked up in the back, come out of his waistband altogether. 

Dick swallowed, and on his next blink kept his eyes shut a bit longer than normal. When he opened them again Nixon had shut his own, as though he'd elected to carry the feline comparison through to a nap before dinner. Dick checked his watch. 

"Sunset's in forty-five minutes," he said. "There's a champagne toast for first class passengers on the Paradise Deck." 

"Paradise," said Nixon, without opening his eyes. "Where the hell's that?" 

***

After his shift Dick pointedly avoided Nixon's cabin, though he should have been well into his second course in the dining room already anyway. He went below instead, grimacing as he left the bracing air of the deck behind and descended into bilge-y humidity. He found his bunk in the little room he shared with Jim and Phil and a fourth guy Dick hadn't met yet. He was new, said Jim, a limey coming over from White Star. 

"Went to splitsville with his old man," he'd told Dick, mouth a sympathetic moue. "Said he couldn't stomach another crossing with the fellow giving him the cold shoulder." Now that Jim and Phil were in one another's back pockets he talked about relationships with a breezy authority Dick might have been annoyed by if he were a little less content to be alone. 

He was alone in the bunk now, and he skinned up his ladder and sat crosslegged in the middle of his mattress. He had a trunk down at the foot of the bed, but he kept most of his personal effects tucked away up here: his Army-issue shaving kit, a comb, his books. A bag of root beer barrels his mother had sent him that he rationed one at a time. A pad of paper and a box of envelopes, and several pens he steadfastly refused to loan out. He had a large leather pouch he'd picked up at some market in Barcelona, hand-tanned and cut. Once he'd thought to have it stamped with his initials but he'd never had the time, and eventually settled for scratching R.D.W. on the front in as ornate a hand as he could manage with the dull spine of his pocket knife. Inside the pouch he kept his letters in a fat stack, and when he was beginning to feel just the barest tinge of discontent at his peripatetic life he took them out and sorted through them, page after page of words from people who seemed to care what he got up to and, likewise, cared that he should keep abreast of them. 

His mother, his sister. DeEtta, who seemed just as stymied by his life at sea as she had been the paratroops. She had a husband now, and a baby, and Dick thought sometimes she must write to him clandestinely, as some secret thrill. He imagined her hunched over a torchlit sheet of paper while her family slept. Harry, who was as happily partnered as Jim and at just as great a risk of being smug about it, a fact that proved to Dick that everyone was just alike in love, no matter who they were with. Ron Speirs, whose letters never contained evidence of anyone on earth, including himself. Ron was a world away now in Korea, which Dick only knew because Lipton's letters weren't quite so opaque. 

He owed letters to all of them now, and tonight he'd set himself the task of choosing someone to reply to. He unbuttoned his shirt as he thought about it and stripped down to his undershirt against the heat of the room. The thought of writing to his parents or to Ann made his chest ache. He couldn't think of anything funny to say to Harry or optimistic enough for Lip. He would write to Ron, he decided, because that would be like writing to nobody at all. 

He had barely set pen to paper when Jim came barreling into the bunk room, giggling madly. Phil was hot on his heels, colliding with Jim's backside, catching him around the hips and grinding against him, the movement obvious enough Dick knew he must be drunk. Or maybe not; Dick was still sometimes surprised at how open men could be with one another here. Perhaps it was only that Phil thought they were alone. Jim threw his head back, and for a moment Dick had the feeling he was watching a still from a film or looking at a photograph, something sentimental and private. Jim's head came level and he caught sight of Dick on the bunk, and he squealed with laughter again. 

"Quit it, here's Winters," he said. He caught Phil's hands and drew them around his waist. "Hiya," he said to Dick. 

"Hey," Dick said. "Hey, Phil." 

Phil nodded. He always looked at Dick with some degree of suspicion, as though he had Dick figured. It's only that you're quiet, Jim had told him once. He always says, it's the quiet ones. Dick didn't know what that was supposed to mean, but he always nodded back when Jim said it. 

"We were looking for you," Jim lied. "Why're you hiding down here? It's hot as shit." 

Dick held up his letter. "Catching up on my correspondence." 

"What, already? We just shoved off. You've got until Southampton at least before you've gotta start sending postcards." 

"I'm behind," Dick said. 

"He's got a whole harem, you see," said Jim. 

Phil snorted. "That's our Dick." 

"Come on down to the Pig," Jim said. "Have a beer. Or a coke. It's not healthy, staying all squirreled away down here." 

"Look, if the two of you want the room—" 

Jim scoffed. "As if we'd need to kick you out of your own bunk. If we need a place to stow away we won't come bothering you about it. I hear the crew pool is nice after hours, for example. And Phil says he flushed a couple of greasers out of the cold pantry the other night, didn't you?" 

Phil rolled his eyes. "Something like that." 

Dick suspected they had wanted the bunk, and that seeing him had set Jim onto one of his periodic manias for Dick's personal improvement. He could tell it bothered Phil when Jim was like this, just as he could tell Jim wouldn't have understood exactly why from either of them. Dick was left straddling a chasm between encouragement and dissuasion, too far out in either direction to please Jim or Phil, or himself for that matter. What would please him was, as ever, to be left alone. Tonight he didn't think that was in the cards. 

"Get down here," Jim said. "Just a drink. Rosie's asking about you." 

Dick groaned. "That's not encouraging," he said. 

Jim laughed. "Aw, c'mon. She's a good dancer. Even if she's not what you're looking for," he added slyly. 

Dick ignored him, only sighed and climbed down from his bunk. 

The Pig was the crew bar, aft from their bunk and adjacent to the rec room just off a second warren of stewards' bunks. The whole crew could be seen to congregate down at the Pig, though the seamen tended to keep to themselves, the captain and mates to their finer quarters abovedecks. The Pig was representative, Dick thought. If the belowdecks crew were distilled into a single space, it would be the Pig, dark and close, strung with lights behind the bar that glowed pink and white, a battered Pearl Beer sign pinned on the wall, the detritus of several holidays' worth of decorations that, rather than be taken down out of season, had been allowed to remain and tangle into a faded and tattered amalgam. Opposite the bar were positioned a host of tables and a few booths like the kind you might find in a luncheonette, chipped dirty-white formica. The ceiling was low, the carpet dark and spongy. Dick had never seen the place with the lights on and didn't want to. 

The Pig was jammed tonight, the first of many nights passed there over the course of the season. They'd make this seven-day jaunt to Southampton, stay a few days to restock supplies and turn back around. Then down to the Caribbean and back up along the eastern seaboard to New York and back to England, the ship bouncing around the globe like a rubber ball. Later in the year there'd be a long cruise, from England to the Med and then to Africa. They'd be weeks at sea then, and the nightlife here would gain a frantic cadence, particularly in the middle of a long crossing. Dick was gladder than ever then that he didn't drink, if only to spare himself the increasingly outlandish concoctions the stewards came up with and dared each other to consume in the name of blowing off steam. 

The days would be filled with work, lying by the staff pool in off hours, leaning out over the deep and watching for schools of flying fish, for strange pale creatures that passed just under the surface, for wheeling seabirds that heralded an impending port. Even the passengers seemed more relaxed on long crossings, the barriers between client and employee collapsed in the face of the age-old battle: man against sea, man against maddening idleness, never mind that it was, for the most part, freely chosen.

"Dick!" 

He was startled out of his thoughts; Rosie was on him with a couple of drinks. A foamy cup of beer for her and a bonus orange soda. Why she'd picked that for him, he didn't know, but it was better than having to turn down booze. Of course, knowing Rosie the orange might be cut with vodka. He looked up and caught Jim's eye across the bar; he stuck his tongue out at Dick and then turned back to Phil, pecked him on the cheek. The sight made Dick feel strange, suddenly more inclined to turn back to Rosie and let her guide him to one of the little booths. 

"Ugh, it's all sticky," she said, frowning at the table when they sat. "Don't they ever wipe this place down?" 

"Look around," Dick said. "You think anyone here but you cares? But here," he said, fishing an ice cube out of his drink and skating it around the table with his napkin. 

She laughed. "I think you made it worse," she said. "Cheers." She clipped their cups together and drank, and he followed suit. The soda was flat and too sweet, and he spat half his mouthful back into the cup and set it at his elbow. 

"You been okay?" she asked. 

"Sure," he said. 

"Do anything with your time off? See your family?" 

"Yeah, for a couple of days." 

"Well, that's nice," she said. "Are they in the city?" 

"No," Dick said. "Pennsylvania. Not too far. I took the train." 

They'd had a couple of weeks off for resupply and minor repairs. Most of the crew had dispersed—to see the sights, to rent rooms in the city or go further afield. Enough of them were English that the city was still a tourist attraction, and it might have been for Dick if he'd been inclined. But he'd gone home, and to Wilkes-Barre on the way back up to see Harry and Kitty and the baby. The memory of the visit made him feel as ill at ease as Jim had a moment ago; he'd felt as if they'd picked at the same sort of scab. 

_C'mon,_ Harry had said, bouncing the baby on his knee. _You're telling me you don't want a couple of these?_

Dick shrugged. The baby was fat-cheeked and rosy and had a pale tangle of hair just like Harry's. 

_Leave him alone,_ said Kitty from the sink. 

The baby looked at Dick. He gave a burbling cry, and a bubble of milk appeared in his open mouth. Earlier he had fussed and batted at Kitty's breasts through her dress and she'd cooed back at him and pressed him to her. Do you mind? she'd asked, and Dick had blinked and said no, of course not, without quite understanding. She'd undone her buttons and exposed herself matter-of-factly; even Harry had seemed bored by it, and unmoved by Dick's presence. Her breast was pale and blue-veined as a cheese, the nipple chapped and reddened. The baby had lunged for her and sucked lustily, and Kitty had given a small sigh of relief and pleasure that Dick felt horrified to have overheard.

 _Buck up, buddy,_ said Harry, clapping Dick on the back. _It's natural._

She nursed until the baby was drowsy, chatting with them easily all the while, directing Harry at the latticework of a cherry pie she would press on Dick at the front door later, its tin plate wrapped in a blue-flowered dishcloth. The baby fell asleep at her breast with his mouth wide as a bass. There now, Kitty said. She eased herself back into her dress and offered him to her husband. 

Already Harry hefted his son's body with the casualness of a seasoned parent, and now he galloped him in place with an enthusiasm bordering on violence. _He likes it,_ Harry said, and indeed the baby squealed and grinned. Harry looked hard at Dick and narrowed his eyes, as though he could see something written all over Dick's face, something Dick dearly wanted to divine but couldn't, try as he might through years and nautical miles, long minutes in the mirror. 

_What?_ Dick had asked with trepidation. Tell me. If you know, please tell me. 

But Harry just shook his head and asked another question. _You're really going to just keep sailing back and forth?_

In the bar there was a scratch as the record was changed, and a gentle roar of protest from the crowd. "Easy, easy," yelled someone. "You'll like this." When the music returned it was a Benny Goodman record, and Rosie gulped her beer and clapped her hands. 

"You've got to dance with me," she said. 

He shook his head. "It's too hot." 

"You're in your undershirt," she said, raising an eyebrow. "And we're both sweating like pigs, so you might as well." 

He laughed uneasily. He was caught, and now he knew it. She was holding her hand out, waggling her fingers. Jim was right, she was a good dancer, and she was pretty, with a bright sundress that would flip and swirl when she turned. He was no match for her. She wasn't what he was looking for. Jim had been right about that too, but it hardly mattered. 

"Come on," she said. 

He groaned, and it made her laugh harder. 

"Here we are," she said into his ear when they were moving together on the cramped floor. "I've been gunning for this since at least two runs ago." 

"You've worn me down," he said. 

She grinned. "Took too long." 

He gripped her around the waist and dipped her. 

When the music slowed she grew heavier in his arms. He pressed his palm to the small of her back over her skin, and he could feel her muscles shift as she moved. She smelled like clean sweat and jasmine perfume. Her hair was wet and slicked back from her forehead, stray wisps curling around her temples as they dried. She was young. He might be dancing with his sister. To be eighteen, nineteen and all the way out here—he couldn't picture it before the war. Already the world seemed changed, bolder. 

"Keep me company," she murmured in his ear. 

Dick swallowed. "What?" 

"Just until England. You got a girl?" 

"No, but—" 

"Then what's the trouble?" 

He sighed. Immediately he felt her stiffen against him. He'd embarrassed her, he guessed, and instantly he was soaked with regret. But there was nothing for it. She made as if to pull away, and he ran a hand down her arm. 

"Hey," he said. "The song isn't over." 

She hesitated a moment. Then she laughed and laid her head on his shoulder. "You're sweet." 

He wasn't. He wasn't sure if he'd ever been. He'd been young and stupid, and blundered through most interactions with women in a way that could pass for innocence but was more akin to carelessness. It never occurred to him to worry about what they thought. Maybe that was why he'd got so crosswise with DeEtta. 

"You're a nice girl," he said. "It's just—" 

"Shh. I know." 

So she wouldn't make him say it, the same way Jim would never ask. He wasn't yet bold enough not to be grateful for discretion. He wasn't sure he ever would be. 

***

Dick was sweaty enough from dancing that when he emerged from belowdecks the sea air felt chilly. He wrapped his arms around himself and felt the gooseflesh come up on his skin and tried to feel grateful for the cold, for he'd be back below and stifling soon enough. For now he walked the deck, listening to the roll and lap of the waves against the ship and looked up at the starry scraps of night sky he could see here and there through the cloud cover. As he walked along aft he came upon the glowing point of a cigarette and then the long smudge of a figure darker than the dark beyond. 

"Hey," said the man, and Dick realized it was Nixon. He was standing against the railing staring out to sea, or he had been before Dick had happened on him. 

"Hello," Dick said. 

"Working late?" 

Nixon looked him over. Dick could feel him taking in Dick's rumpled dungarees, his undershirt, which had come loose from his waistband somewhere in the course of the dancing. His hair must be mess. He started to run a hand back through it before stopping himself, reminding himself he oughtn't to care what Nixon thought when he looked at him. Beyond a professional capacity, of course. 

"No," Dick said. 

"Where the hell've you been? You look like you've been hauling freight." 

"Oh, you know. Belowdecks shoveling coal." 

"What, really?" 

Dick laughed and leaned on the railing beside him. Nixon was rakish, to be sure, and laissez-faire, but the the way his eyes widened made him look innocent and touristy in a way Dick found charming. "No, not really. I was down in the staff bar." 

The notion of the staff bar seemed to make Nixon more childishly happy than Dick below in the engine room, and Dick found himself smiling back. A consequence of the atmosphere, maybe: the deck was rimed with yellow light that bobbed and dipped in the breeze, the effect warm and soft as it played over Nixon's features. There was a bright bunting that arced cheerfully along the railing that quivered in that same bracing air. Someone had left a cotton duck cushion strapped to one of the chaise-longue deck chairs and its scalloped trim flapped; Dick would untie it when he went in, take it to a little storeroom off the stairwell and pile it atop its fellows to save it growing crusty with salt, and tomorrow he'd seek out the man whose job it had been to clear the deck at sunset and remind him to take greater care. 

"You don't drink," Nixon said. 

"Huh?" 

"You were in the bar," Nixon said. "Only you told me you don't drink." He had his eyebrow cocked as if pleased to have caught Dick in a lie. 

"I had an orange soda," Dick said, with a baldness that couldn't be taken for anything but the truth. "I wouldn't even have had that, but she made me." 

"She make you take your shirt off too?" 

Dick ran a hand over his goosepimpled biceps. "It's hot down there," he said. 

"Yeah, it's hot in my cabin too," said Nixon. 

"She did make me dance," Dick offered, though why he did so he didn't know. Nixon was the sort of fellow who was bound to seize on this detail in a way Dick would only find embarrassing. She'd MADE him dance. She'd made him DANCE. At Benning the boys would've lived off this tidbit for weeks. _Anybody make you dance lately, Lieutenant Winters? Say, Winters, you oughta come with us down Columbus way Saturday night. I hear these Georgia dames'll put a gun to your head._ And so forth, ad infinitum. But Nixon surprised him, simply nodded and asked "She a decent dancer?" and nodded again when Dick said she was. Dick left out her question, as well as the ease he'd felt when she hadn't pressed him for a better answer. 

"Dancing's fun," Nixon said. "I used to go out dancing all the time in the city." 

"Oh?" 

"Well, before the war," Nix said. "Times Square was real fun then." 

"What about after?" Dick asked. 

"After I was married," Nixon said dryly, his expression growing closed. "What about you, you go out much in the city?" 

"Not me." 

"You from around here? You don't sound like you're from England." 

"Twenty questions," said Dick, clasping the railing running white and slim as a shinbone. 

"I'm bored," Nixon said. 

"There's a movie on in the lounge," said Dick automatically. There was; he had the schedule memorized. Tonight was The Outlaw, with Jane Russell. The greasers liked it because "you got to see her tits," but when Nixon was waving Dick off before he'd even gotten finished rattling off the title. 

"I've seen it," said Nixon. "Humor me." 

"I'm from Pennsylvania," Dick said, feeling beleaguered for the second time tonight. "Lancaster. I was just home before we sailed." That last to head off the next couple of questions, maybe bore Nixon anew. There wasn't much about Lancaster that couldn't be beaten out by Jane Russell, particularly for the sort of person who liked to go dancing in Times Square. 

"Hey, I'm from New Jersey. We're neighbors," Nixon said. "You ever hear of a town called—" He broke off and barked a laugh. 

"What?" 

"Nixon," Nixon said. 

"What?" 

"That's the name of the town." 

Dick rolled his eyes so Nixon could see; it seemed to be the reaction he wanted, or at least the one he was expecting. He grinned and rolled his own back, and Dick felt instantly that he had passed some sort of test, and further that he was glad of it, relieved in a way he probably shouldn't be. 

"So you own a town," said Dick, though of course he didn't. A whole town belonging to someone seemed ludicrous, and anyway, you couldn't own a whole town. Could you?

"My father owns a town. Not really. The town's just named for—you know, I don't actually know who it's named for. My grandfather, maybe." 

"The shipwright?" 

"That's the one." Nixon sighed. "Anyhow, it's ridiculous." He looked at Dick sidelong. "Most people get a kick out of it." 

Dick grimaced. "I think it sounds awful," he said. "Your name on everyone's mind all the time." 

Dick could do without people thinking of him, knowing who he was. The war was bad enough, Winters this and that, men who'd never even seen him in person judging and reviewing him, paging through a campaign's worth of moves he'd made on a combination of rote training and gut instinct, mud and sweat and blood. His was a name you didn't want to see, a signature on a letter bearing news that ranged from bad to very, very bad. And even after, back home, it seemed everyone had known him, had heard something or had some question. But a whole town would be worse, he thought. A sign on the highway, emblazoned and watched for: pull off at Nixon, I've got to piss. Remember that year we lived in Nixon, when everything went wrong?

"Yeah, it's not great," Nixon said. He was frowning thoughtfully, consideringly, but when he spoke again it didn't have anything to do with Nixon, New Jersey. "So what do you do around here for fun?" he asked. "Besides Jane Russell's cleavage and not drinking in the staff bar?" 

Dick wasn't sure if he was asking in general or about Dick specifically. Both answers were about the same, anyway; Dick didn't so much have fun as participate in fun as scheduled. 

"There's exhibition wrestling," he said, because it was the first thing that came to mind. 

Nixon snorted. "There's what, now?" 

"Wrestling. They hold exhibition matches in a ring up on deck. With betting and everything, but it's only for drinks tokens, not real money." 

"Even so," said Nixon. "High stakes." 

Dick shrugged. "There's judo too, we've got a guy on deck crew who can kick a board in half."

Nixon looked him up and down. "You look like you could do a number on a board." 

Something in his voice brought Dick up short. He noticed for the first time just how close they'd moved together. On account of the stiff breeze, maybe, or else by virtue of some subtler gravity, one Dick felt unprepared to consider. Nixon was looking at him appreciatively, enough so that it would be easy to forget he'd only recently split up with his wife and was supposed to be accordingly broken-hearted. 

"I don't know judo," Dick said. "I am a sure bet in the wrestling, but you didn't hear that from me."

"Ah," said Nixon, voice a sight croaky. "I appreciate the tip." 

"There'll be a match tomorrow, and every afternoon the weather's good." 

"Oh," said Nixon. 

"Are you all right?" Dick asked. 

"Sure," said Nixon. "Wrestling, check. What else?" 

"There's a variety show, but I don't think we'll do it until the return trip. They like the crew to get—familiar, I think, before we put it on. Will you stay?" 

"Stay?" 

"In England. Were you—were you just planning to go there and back? Some people do, some people just like the cruise." He was babbling. He'd decided, having brought it up, that it would be better to get away from the subject of the variety show. 

"Oh," Nixon said again. "Hell, I hadn't thought about it until now. We booked hotels, in Southampton and in London. I'll have to wire and cancel." 

"You could go alone," Dick said. "London's nice." 

"I've been," said Nixon, sounding suddenly miserable. 

At once Dick felt like a heel for bringing it up, and like an idiot besides. He scrubbed a hand over his face. The tip of his nose was cool, the warmth belowdecks forgotten. "Better keep the room in Southampton," he said. "We'll lay over a couple of days." 

"And you?" Nixon asked. "What'll you do then?" 

"Nothing much," Dick said. "Kill the time somehow, I guess." 

He bit his lip and looked out to sea. The sky had clouded over and the horizon was indiscernible, a fathomless blackness that seemed to press right up against his cheek like a pane of obsidian. He remembered not so long ago he'd flown like an arrow straight through the heart of that same blackness, refusing to consider that he'd ever make his way back to England again. But he had, and now he'd come and gone a dozen times since. Back again, he did have a plan. It involved green hills and stone walls, a cream tea unhampered now by rationing. He craved tea as much as coffee these days, a fact that baffled him, and one old woman's tea in particular, but that was more than he felt inclined to explain to Nixon at the moment. 

"I should go to bed," he said. "It's—what time is it? It seems late." He didn't have his watch on. 

"Midnight," said Nixon, inspecting his own wristwatch. A silver and gold Rolex. Dick shouldn't have been close enough to notice. 

"Heck." It was late. Time on ship seemed mutable to Dick, the hours and days blurring like watercolors. He was due up at six to for the coffee service. "Look, can I help you with anything? I hate to think—" 

"What?" 

"That you're—" Melancholy, Dick thought. "That you're not having a good time." 

Nixon laughed softly. "If I'm not, it's nobody's fault but my own. At least that's what Kathy would say if you asked." 

He exhaled and pushed backwards off the railing, away from Dick. He wiped his palms off on his trousers. He'd shed his tie—the dining room required them, so he must have worn one earlier—and undone the buttons at his collar to expose a thatch of dark hair. The hair on his head was windblown, melting into the night behind him, and his cheeks were cast in shadow. He was the sort of man who really ought to shave twice a day. If he were Dick, he would have, but Dick got the impression Nixon would take the opportunity to cultivate a beard. 

Dick stood up straight and stepped away from the railing himself. "Well," he said quietly. "I don't plan on asking. But you'll let me know, won't you, if there's anything you need? Help with those wires, maybe. To London." 

Nixon winced. "You're good at your job," he said, as if that was the only reason Dick was asking. "I was wrong before when I said you hated it. You couldn't be so good and hate it." 

"Do you take coffee in the mornings?" 

"Of course I do," said Nixon, sounding offended Dick would even think to ask. 

"Cream and sugar?" 

"Black," Nixon said. "But bring the sugar anyway." 

Dick nodded. "We serve it in the dining room," he said. "Starting at seven. But I'll come by your cabin with a pot." 

Nixon raised an eyebrow. "I told you you were good," he said. 

"It's just a job," Dick said. "Have a good night, Mr. Nixon." 

"It's Lewis," Nixon said. He stubbed out his cigarette and tossed the butt overboard. Then he shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at Dick, as though he wanted to see what Dick thought of the implied request. 

"Lewis, then," Dick said. 

"Or Lew. Or Nix. Or anything, really, besides 'Mr. Nixon'." 

"Whichever you'd prefer," Dick said, feeling unequipped to decide himself. He'd always been suspicious of men who assigned themselves nicknames; it was one thing to seize on some moniker in the first flush of friendship but another to have it suggested, and from a passenger in the midst of a personal crisis, at that. 

Nixon laughed dryly and tapped another cigarette out of his pack. "I'll think about it," he said. Then he fastened his gaze on the horizon, though if he saw anything there it was in his own mind's eye and nowhere else. The black air was impenetrable, though Nixon seemed inclined to try anyway. Well, Dick thought, he wasn't likely to need company. He took the opportunity to withdraw, to mutter his goodnights again and go below, and Nixon, lost in thought already, did not acknowledge him. 

***

For years after he was landlocked again Dick would continue to maintain that the finest thing in the world was to wrestle a man in the salt air, sun on your back, blue sky above. The sheer physicality of it, the motion, the burn of muscles. The way an opponent would fight and fight and fight and suddenly, abruptly yield. On the deck Dick took on all comers; early in his career they'd come swaggering, big greasers, smirking at him. The sort of men who thought wrestling was simply fighting, didn't understand there was an art to it. These were the opponents he most enjoyed vanquishing and had since high school. He took such pride in doing so, in seeing them on the ground, he thought it must be the closest he'd ever come to perversity.

Now he only went a few bouts with newcomers, or with the fellow from the engine room rated second best. That was gentlemanly, sporting, as the Brits would say, and the two of them would feint and tumble dramatically for the passengers. Dick won a large pot of drinks tickets every time, though once they'd noticed he only distributed them amongst the staff in the Pig someone talked the purser into ten dollars extra tacked onto Dick's paycheck, more than likely knowing he'd buy a round or two anyway. 

Today he flipped Carter from engines with the usual aplomb. Carter groaned into the mats and the crowd cheered, and Dick stood sheepishly and pumped his fist in the air because he'd learned by now they liked it. He saw Nixon on the sidelines. He was wearing his sunglasses, and his expression was indiscernible. 

"He was watching you," Jim said after. 

"Who was?" Dick asked, playing dumb. 

They were in the bunk, Dick mopping at himself with a cloth and Jim pretending not to look. Phil was scarce, working up on deck, and Dick was glad to avoid the inevitable awkwardness. 

"Shut up," said Jim. "He was. Through those glasses. Thought he was being subtle." 

"Hmm," said Dick. 

"Hmm, he says. Well, it's true," Jim said. "He was rooting for you, and it wasn't just for the drinks tickets." 

"You sure about that? He is a drinker." 

"Oh, honey," Jim said. "Aren't they all." 

"You're acting like you approve," Dick said, dragging an undershirt on over his head. 

Jim watched unashamedly now, and bit his lip. "I approve of anyone who'll get you to live a little," he said. "Even if he is an entitled ass." 

Dick snorted. The funny thing, he thought, was that Jim had begun to act as though things were already decided. Later he would consider that perhaps they had been.

***

At dinner that evening Dick stood in for a waiter who was down with a cold. He borrowed the fellow's tux, which fit decently, and as luck would have it he waited on the table beside Nixon's, so that he ferried drinks to and fro and whisked the silver covers off of steaming tureens of food just opposite him for all four courses worth of the second seating. When he wasn't serving he stood against the wall and watched another waiter flirting with a paunchy older man with tufts of white hair protruding from either ear. Nixon was watching too, and more than once his eyes found Dick's around the coiffed heads of his tablemates. He raised an eyebrow; Dick's mouth quirked upwards in reply. 

Dessert was a rosy, globular pudding of indeterminate flavor. One of the cooks had tasted it and frowned and spat it out into the garbage. She only made these things, she said; it was the Cunard chefs who came up with the recipes. "It's lychee," said the flirtatious waiter. "You never ate a lychee before? Flavor's real delicate." 

"I know something else that's got a delicate flavor," said someone, and the waiter shoved his hands in his pockets and said he was going for a smoke.

Nixon didn't eat his pink pudding, only carved it into twin half moons. The diners were flushed and disorganized with drink, and three-quarters of Nixon's table had either left or migrated elsewhere in the dining room. Dick had cleared his own table and approached Nixon's, white-gloved hand outstretched. 

"Are you finished, sir?" he asked. 

"Jesus," Nixon said. "What'd I tell you?" He offered Dick the pudding, which wobbled on its saucer. "It's Lew." 

"Not here," Dick said quietly. "Head waiter'll boot me off at Southampton for anything less than 'sir.'" 

"Were you in the service?" 

Dick nodded. 

"Navy? I'm trying to picture you kowtowing to authority." 

"Army," Dick said. "And I didn't taketo it." 

"Oh," said Nixon. "I thought Navy. An ocean liner—" 

"Most of them were Navy," Dick said, jerking his head around. 

"I was Army," Nixon said. "I rode a desk and translated intelligence briefs." 

"I was in the Airborne," Dick said. 

Nixon winced and took a slug of his drink. "Better give me back that pudding. I'll hold it close and tell it all about how I met an honest-to-god paratrooper and made a fool of myself at every opportunity." 

"Only the one time, by my count," Dick said. "And anyway, we had our share of fools." He was thinking of Dike, of Sobel. Folded amongst Dick's letters there was a map the latter had written to demand back and which Dick had absolutely no intention of relinquishing.

"Mm. I might've fit right in." Nixon cast about the room. "It's getting romantic in here," he said. 

"A little." 

The room was warmly lit with melting candles. There was a string quartet in a corner playing a loopy nocturne. Nixon's mouth was wet with whisky. "I've got to get the hell out," he said. He was grinning but there was a tension to it, as though he'd caught the first whiff of poison gas. 

Dick had a thought then. Or not a thought: an impulse, a raw and barely recognizable moment of desire. "Wait for me outside," he said. "I'll take you somewhere that's not romantic at all."

***

Nixon hesitated on the steps leading belowdecks, swaying in the doorway with an uncustomary reticence. "Are you sure it's all right?" he asked. 

Dick leaned in the doorway. "I thought you were friends with the captain." 

"I just—are you going to get in trouble?" 

"No," Dick said. 

And it was true—fraternizing with passengers might not have been strictly aboveboard, but the powers that be certainly turned a blind eye. The gentleman in the dining room would scarcely be offended should his dapper young waiter turn up at his cabin door. Indeed, it would make him feel any number of things he hadn't felt in a very long time, maybe ever: attractive, certainly. Young. Alive. And isn't that worth the cost of admission? Jim had said, eyebrow aloft, when Dick had asked him about the middle-aged man whose lap Jim perched on for the entirety of the Neptune Revue, except for the parts in which he'd prowled the stage in a floor-length satin evening gown. Perhaps, Dick considered, he'd grown ever-so-slightly jaded.

On deck now Nixon still looked dubious. "Will they mind? Your friends, I mean." 

Dick could tell he was thinking of Jim. "Buy a round or two, they'll be fine." 

"What do they drink?" 

"I don't know. Whatever's on offer. Once it was cooking wine, but that was in the middle of the South Pacific." 

Nixon made a face. "Hang on a second, will you? I'll be right back." And then he turned on his heel and jogged off along the handrail. Dick half thought he'd run away entirely, but he loomed up out of the gloaming again a few minutes later, cradling a trio of bottles. 

"Bribery?" Dick asked, and Nixon grinned. 

"Lubrication," he said. 

Down in the bar he plunked the lot of them on the bartop and raised an eyebrow at Jim, who'd sidled up to gloat and to glower at Nixon. Nixon set his hands on his hips and glowered back, and after a tense moment in which Dick and Phil had seemed to wordlessly consider whether or not to drag them apart they dissolved into laughter, clapped one another on the back and were instantly comrades. 

"You all drink this up," Nixon said. "I brought too goddamn much of it." He grabbed for a glass and set it in front of Jim, and let the guy playing bartender pop the bottles and pour. 

Before Dick quite knew what had happened he was sitting beside Nixon at a booth across from Jim and Phil. "Look at this, we're doubling," Jim said, and Dick kicked him under the table. Next to him Nixon was quiet; he kept casting around the room as though to catch people stealing glances, which of course they were. It wasn't the first time a passenger had been to the Pig; there were always a few who drifted in and out on a cruise in the company of a crewman, but they were met with as much fanfare as Jim and Phil, or the other couples like them. No, Dick was fairly certain he was the confounding factor now—Nixon sitting close to him in the little booth, their thighs pressed together. The way the two of them were paired off with two men who were quite clearly a particular sort of friend. 

Dick examined the possibility that the crowd might assume the same of him and Nixon and found it less than objectionable. He supposed that over the last two years or so he'd made a show of being alone, if only by virtue of the fact that his compatriots were so frequently _together_. If you didn't have someone you talked about your search, and loudly, in case a potential object might overhear and allow themselves to be found. Dick didn't understand it. But now he'd met Nixon, and while there was no co-occurring bolt of clarity he was beginning to consider how the idea might be appealing. 

They drank—Dick his soda, the rest of them glass after glass of Vat 69. Their faces grew flushed and Dick began to feel, curiously, as though he too had been at the hard stuff. He felt warm, an oily looseness to his joints. He understood now what Nixon had meant by lubrication. 

"So," Jim said. "We're doing _The Mikado_ for the variety show." 

The crew was fond of Gilbert and Sullivan. Dick hadn't known an operetta from an osprey until he'd done a few runs back and forth across the Atlantic. Now he found himself whistling an stray overture while making up beds. 

"What, the whole thing?" Dick asked. 

"You think they'll hold still for the whole thing?" Jim said. "Of course not. Just a couple numbers. But we need a third little maid from school. What do you say, Winters?" 

"Who're one and two?" Dick asked, as if the answer might sway him from what was always destined to be a very firm no.

"Jim and one of the junior pursers," Phil said. "They both look real good in a dress." 

At that Nixon coughed loudly into his drink. 

One of the other stewards learned across the back of the booth. He was a wiry guy with a mop of hair and mouth that was wide like a fish's. He drummed his fingers beside Dick's head. "Dick's date ought to be the third," he said, grinning at Nixon. "He's got a pretty face. Needs a shave, though." 

"Fuck off, Les," Jim said, and lobbed an ice cube at him. He whooped and ducked away, abandoning the booth to a surge of discomfort. All at once Dick realized he didn't know anything about Nixon, not really. For all Dick knew he was thoroughly disgusted by the thought of the variety show, of Jim in a dress, of Dick beside him, of all of it. He swallowed. Nixon swallowed his drink. Someone put a record on, and much to Dick's chagrin Jim took the opportunity to slide out of the booth with Phil on his heels. They joined a burgeoning group of dancers, coming together with an ease that even now seized Dick about the heart. 

Watching them sway together he understood fully why the sea pulled at Jim the way it did, why their fourth bunkmate, lovelorn, had simply swapped one liner for another rather than setting foot on land again. He felt they were all adrift here together, and that even if a man were inclined to be disgusted he couldn't help but have the feeling softened by the love-light in Jim's eyes now, by the easy way he joked with the greasers and the deck crew and the waiters alike, by his escapades up on the shade deck in the wee hours. 

Nixon was drawing his index finger through a droplet of whiskey on the table top, head propped up on one hand. He was looking out at the center of the room, and after a moment he looked back and met Dick's eyes across the booth. He canted his dark head ever so slightly towards the dance floor, and Dick felt a settling in his gut like the plunk of a stone. 

"You want to?" Nixon asked. 

Dick shook his head reflexively, and there was a moment in which he saw quite clearly that here was where it would end, if that was what he wanted. 

"Not here," Dick said, and Nixon smiled. 

"My cabin?" 

Dick took a breath. "Sure," he said. 

They didn't dance in Nixon's cabin. When Nixon slid the door closed behind him he stepped in close to Dick and held him as though he meant to dance together, his hand on Dick's waist, another holding one of his at shoulder height. In the bar Dick had divested himself of both the tuxedo jacket and his tie; the rumpled jacket he'd draped over a chair, having carried it to Nixon's room draped over one shoulder. The tie, he feared, was lost for good. He was distracted, and in the moment couldn't bring himself to care. Up close Nixon's expression looked softer, his eyes bright and wide as a child's. He was rubbing his thumb up and down, strumming at one of Dick's ribs. 

"I wasn't sure you were the type," Nixon said quietly. "I was trying to feel you out." 

Dick wasn't sure he was the type. He wasn't sure there was a type, precisely, though he knew it was important to people, to feel they belonged somewhere or to try and sort out how others belonged. Dick knew there were far worse things to be than a lover of other men; he'd seen some of them, and having done so found himself reasonably unshockable, particularly in regards to himself. He liked Nixon's hands on his waist; he'd liked the thought of Nixon watching him up on deck, though these were facts he would only ever examine in the sort of privacy that was rare on ship. He hadn't quite expected to examine them so closely yet, and certainly not in present company. 

"You were married," Dick said plainly. "Or is this why you sailed to England all by yourself?" 

Nixon shrugged. "Probably part of it," he said. "One way or another." 

"I don't want to—" Dick stopped himself. 

He licked his lips, stayed suddenly by uncertainty. He didn't want…what didn't he want? To complicate matters? To go out on a limb? To expose himself, most likely; already being here with Nixon felt as if he'd had a log rolled off of him, had been roused from a loneliness worn smooth around the borders of his body.

"Don't worry about it," Nixon said. 

Dick kissed him. 

They hadn't danced, but this was better. Their mouths pressed together, dry and soft. A peck, a brush of lips; a flock of verbs for kisses trailed against him like downy animals or the tender heads of ferns. Dick leaned in so their bodies were flush, so Nixon's arm came around his waist and the hand holding his set it free to drape over his shoulder. Nixon fiddled with Dick's hairline and his jaw and the knob of his third vertebra, a series of small touches Dick found impossibly arresting, having never been touched this way before within the scope of his conscious memory, with such curiosity and freedom. 

Nixon's bed was more spacious than Dick's, though not by much, with just enough room for another slim body to lie alongside the first. They lay parallel, Nixon touching his face. "Do you tan?" he asked. "You look a little pink." 

"I burn. I try and stay out of the sun." 

"You were up on the deck without a shirt on," said Nixon. "For a long time. You ought to let me see." 

And that was a come-on, had to be, though why Nixon thought he needed it with Dick lying beside him was a mystery. But Dick unbuttoned anyway, skinned the undershirt off over his head and rolled onto his stomach for inspection. 

He could feel Nixon frown at his back. "Jesus, you're red. This'll peel," he said. 

He dug his thumb into the meat of Dick's shoulder. It hurt but not unpleasantly; his touch stung like an ice cube, as though Dick had enough heat within him to make Nixon chilly by contrast. Dick sighed and Nixon removed his thumb, replacing it a moment later with his lips. Dick moaned then, without meaning to. 

"Turn over," Nixon said, and Dick did, and he was smiling, smiling into Nixon's face as into bright light, and Nixon smiled back and when they kissed again their mouths were open. 

*** 

On the deck they see the port at Southampton creep into view over the horizon. Dick in uniform, a bruise in the rough shape of a mouth under the line of his collar. He's missed a button but he doesn't care. Once docked the ship will sigh wearily and submit herself to a rough currying, a mare ridden hard. Dick will strip the beds and ball towels up to shove down the laundry chute. He will envy the laundresses their purging steam and sigh with pleasure when he steps, much later, into a hot stream of water in the private shower in Lewis Nixon's hotel room. 

They have three days. Nixon thinks he'll make the return trip back to New York. The thought thrills Dick in a way that frightens him. They take a train to Wiltshire and the hills are stunningly green, bluebells staining the bellies of the little copses. The airfield, the churchyard. Nixon walks beside him in the street and looks around, blessedly speechless. Mrs. Barnes has made the spare room up for him and doesn't blink at the extra body. 

Have you met anyone? she asks Dick in the kitchen. Her skin bruises with the overripe ease of the elderly; she has a plaster glued to her forearm by a dab of dark blood. She's bought a new tin of biscuits for him; she keeps narrow glass jars full of rejects, the plain ones neither of them will eat but that she can't bear to throw away, and she brings one of the jars out now the way she always does, with some vain hope. Nixon grabs for it and retrieves a biscuit between thumb and forefinger, soaks it in his tea. The look she gives him for it might be love. 

Maybe, Dick says.


End file.
